With the Republican Congress perilously close to funding President Obama’s unlawful mass amnesty, and amid Democrats’ increasingly strident opposition to any border controls, recently-released Census data for 2013 underscore the dangers posed by unlimited immigration of the poor into our country.

The figures show that decades of unchecked immigration (illegal and legal) of very poor people into America has made it impossible for us to reduce our poverty rate and is increasing U.S. income inequality.

Consider the last half-century: we have enjoyed unimaginable technological progress, we have more people going to college and many more women in the workforce. We have also spent more than $20 trillion in a “war on poverty.” But, incredibly, the poverty rate sits just where it was in 1966, and the total number of poor people is dramatically higher than it was back then.

In other words, our immigration policy is to import poverty. It’s insanity.

Let’s look at a few figures. In the last 35 years, the foreign-born population has doubled and the number of people in poverty is up 80%. What a coincidence.

How have Hispanics, the biggest immigrant group in recent decades, been doing? Since the Census Bureau first began recording Hispanic data in 1972, the poverty rate for Hispanics has risen, not fallen. Both the rate of Hispanic poverty and the total number of Hispanics in poverty in the United States have risen over the last four decades.

What’s more, as Pew Research noted earlier this year, with the U.S. Hispanic population having quintupled since 1972, a majority of the increase in people living in poverty since then has come from Hispanics.

That should not surprise us, given how poor most entrants to our country are. Census Bureau figures confirm that median household income when the householder is not a citizen is significantly lower than for other households.

Even Joe Biden’s former Chief Economist admitted, as he wrote in the New York Times last fall, that immigrants to the U.S. “have higher-than-average poverty rates.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the Bureau finds that income inequality has increased since 1999. The foreign-born population has risen more than 50% in that time.

Of course, we need to take all poverty statistics with more than a grain of salt, as the measure seems designed by government officials to exaggerate the number of people declared poor. Incredibly, this measure – the government’s leading measure of poverty – does not count the value of food stamps (SNAP), Medicare, Medicaid, public housing, or the earned income tax credit! Still, as the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector points out, the Census data are a good measure of rates of self-sufficiency over time.

The question for open borders politicians and, ultimately, for voters, is this: How does importing millions of very poor and minimally-educated people into the United States help America’s existing poor and middle-class families? It seems that it does not.

The poverty rate of whites is actually higher now than it was in 1964, the unemployment rate for African-Americans age 16-19 who are actively looking for work exceeds 30%, and more than one in four African-Americans are living in poverty. Wages for almost all Americans are stagnant.

Meanwhile, we’ve put $18 trillion on the national credit card, and the Congressional Budget Office projects Medicaid spending will increase 15% this year, while the economy will grow a paltry 2%.

Yet the pace of newcomers is expected to increase in coming years, even before considering the massive magnet of Obama’s unlawful amnesty. The Congressional Research Service reported recently that the foreign-born population, which has more than tripled since 1970 to 41 million people, will blow past 58 million just eight years from now, and perhaps approach 70 million if “comprehensive immigration reform” becomes law.

As the Census data show, this will mean more people in poverty and greater inequality, and it will increase the constituency dependent on Big Government welfare programs.

It’s essential that the American people make the 2016 primaries and general election a referendum on unlimited immigration of the poor into our country. How about we help the 45 million poor people already here escape poverty before we import millions more?

The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by WesternJournalism.com.

One week after a federal judge in Texas blocked implementation of President Obama’s executive amnesty orders, the administration officially asked that same judge to admit his injunction was wrong and to issue a stay on his own decision.

Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that allowing Obama’s unilateral action to defer deportations for millions of illegal immigrants to proceed would cause “irreparable harm” to the states.

Obama’s lawyers on Monday shot back that blocking the president’s amnesty orders would cause “irreparable harm” to the federal government’s effort to do its duty. Part of that supposed duty, as Judge Andrew Napolitano notes about the administration’s position, is to help illegal immigrants to get Social Security numbers and work visas, as Obama has repeatedly promised he would.

“The government wants to break the law so it can help other law breakers stay here,” [Napolitano] stated. “I have never heard the government make an argument like that.”

You can watch the “Fox and Friends” segment with the network’s Senior Judicial Analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano, by clicking on the video above.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday, “Already this calendar year, since January 1, we have had more than 20,000 people come across the border, apprehended, unauthorized. And so we have an ongoing problem on the border that Congress must step up and solve.”

He also stated, “We all saw what happened on the Texas border last summer, but we need to understand that the problem is not going away.”

Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer reminded Abbott that there are 800,000 illegal aliens living in Texas right now, and then said, “You don’t have enough buses to send them back to Mexico, and I don’t expect you can put all of them in jail. What are you going to do with them?”

The governor gave two solutions. “One is,” he said “the president himself said as these people were coming across the border that he would repatriate them as soon as possible. So, we need to see whether or not the president himself is going to live up to the commitment that he made.”

The second was for Congress to take action: “And so we need Congress to have the latitude to fulfill its responsibility to solve the problem.”

Abbott shared his plan to secure the border: “I’m going to add more than 500 more Department of Public Safety officers, more Texas Rangers, more technology. We are coming out of our own pocket, Texas taxpayers’ pockets, to secure the border and doing the job that the federal government must do.”

Abbott recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of 26 states against Obama’s executive amnesty of illegal aliens.

The governor said that it is “essential” to win the case on constitutional grounds “because what we have here is a situation where the president has violated the rule of law and really contradicted the Constitution by actually making up the law and imposing his own standards on the immigration system.”

What do you think about Governor Abbott’s solutions to get illegal immigrants to stop crossing the border? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

Students at Shattuck Middle School reportedly received an assignment recently that has some parents up in arms. According to EAG News, students at the Neenah, Wis., school were given a worksheet depicting two laborers, one of whom is laying bricks along a pathway while the other is removing them. Scroll down for video.

The former man was shown with the Democrat Party’s jackass symbol on his shirt, while the latter’s clothes bore an elephant associated with the GOP.

The eighth grade class was then instructed to analyze the photos and answer a series of questions about their behavior, culminating with the query: “What might this mean to us about immigration and citizenship?”

As it turns out, the two men reportedly signify the Democrat’s effort to build a so-called pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants contrasted by the position of many Republicans that America’s immigration laws should be enforced.

One parent, Scott Radies, was taken aback by the assignment, explaining he initially checked the back of the sheet “to see if the opposite view” was expressed. It wasn’t.

He then perused his son’s answers – for which he was given a perfect grade.

“When I saw his answers to the questions,” Radies explained, “and realized that the teacher gave him five out of five so apparently those answers that he gave were the ones she was looking for because he got them all right.”

Some of the answers he wrote to earn the grade included his analysis that “the Democrat is building [and] the Republican is destroying” and “that the Democrats want immigrants to come in and Republicans don’t.”

As Western Journalism reported Tuesday, a Texas federal judge issued a temporary block on certain aspects of Barack Obama’s executive action regarding illegal immigration. With millions of illegals set to enjoy de facto amnesty beginning this week, Judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling came just days before the controversial order went into effect.

Hanen determined that a porous border and lax security “has exacerbated illegal immigration into this country,” a phenomenon that increasingly taxes resources among the states forced to receive these uninvited residents.

The judge responded to protests by more than half of all U.S. states in ruling that Obama’s order should face further review before being implemented.

“It is preferable to have the legality of these actions determined before the fates of over four million individuals are decided,” Hanen wrote. “An injunction is the only way to accomplish that goal.”

The decision led the Obama administration to delay issuing preferred status to the millions who would benefit from the executive order. South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, a frequent Obama critic and chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee, shared his thoughts on Hanen’s ruling.

He called the decision a “victory for the rule of law,” explaining that Obama’s unilateral order deserved the scrutiny it received.

“The President’s extra-constitutional actions were rooted in political expediency and were devoid of a serious legal underpinning,” Gowdy stated. “This is not and never was about immigration law – as evidenced by the President’s consistent admission that he lacked the legal authority to do precisely what he did.”

While he acknowledged the legitimacy of prosecutorial discretion, Gowdy concluded that it is not “a synonym for anarchy wherein the executive branch can pick and choose portions of laws to enforce and ignore.”